While thinking about the issue of the undervalued Siberian girls (relative to American women), I realized that there is probably a direct correlation between the wealth of a society’s men and the value and power of the society’s women. That is, the richer the men in any given society are in aggregate, the more wealth and privilege accrues to its women. The flip side of that is that the poorer the men are, the worse off and less valued the women.

So, any policies that impoverish men, even if they temporarily benefit the women, cause women’s status and value to decrease over time.

It’s really pretty obvious if you think about it objectively, but it tends to escape notice because these days people don’t think of these things in terms of a symbiotic relationship between men and women, but rather an oppositional one. What they do is compare men and women, and argue that men’s wealth is somehow “oppressive” to women, because that’s how modern, liberal democracies work; each group sees itself in opposition to others.

Here in the West men have been very wealthy by world standards for quite some time. We still are, but this is changing. What’s been happening is that the younger generations of men have steadily lost wealth, while the older folks have managed to hang onto a fair amount. Part of the reason for younger men’s decline in wealth (although by no means all), is feminist affirmative action and “positive discrimination,” as well as confiscatory policies designed to give the female group an advantage over the male. These measures have been effective, and have contributed to the declining wealth of the Western male in both relative and absolute terms.

As the younger, poorer men come of age, and are still significantly poorer than their predecessors, this will begin to impact women of their cohort as well. I believe this process has already begun, but the effects have some lag; perhaps ten years or so. When it becomes readily apparent that living in a country full of poor men is no picnic for women, feminism will be discredited, but not until then. Using the recession as the starting point, I’d give it about five years until it can no longer be ignored.

So, given that women’s status is a result of male wealth, it looks as though feminism may actually turn out to be self-correcting, as it strips men of resources that could be used to further empower women. Maybe human society has a mysterious way of correcting itself, and the natural balance between the sexes is restored even through counterintuitive processes such as feminism.